Hootsuite Competitors: 9 Other Social Media Management Alternatives to Consider

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As one of the leaders in social media marketing software, Hootsuite allows its customers the ability to promote their brand through social channels, generate quality leads, and increase social traffic to their websites, all within one easy-to-use platform.

This Vancouver-based social media management startup recently reached the ten million user milestone, and did it within just six years of being in business. Hootsuite users are able to connect their company’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and other social media pages through the system in order to schedule posts, monitor brand mentions, reply to messages, and more. Hootsuite’s pricing model includes a free plan for individual users, a $9.99/month plan for small marketing teams, as well as custom pricing on an unlimited access plan for enterprise companies.

Hootsuite is easily considered one of the most comprehensive social media management tools available. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right one for your business’ social media needs.

We did some investigating and found these top nine alternatives to Hootsuite. We look at each, individually, below, and you can also easily compare their features and functionality in this chart:

Price: $25 – $250 per month

This California startup is taking the social sphere by storm. In only five years since Buffer was founded, they have gained over two million active users! 2,500+ of those users are publishers and agencies including brands like About.com, Fortune, and Business Insider.

With a fully distributed team working from multiple countries and continents, you can bet your last dollar that they’ll be fixing bugs and responding to all your questions from all around the world. Talk about all-encompassing!

Buffer Differentiators:

Price: $59 – $500 per month

If you’re looking for a cleaner dashboard and some additional analytics with all your posts, Sprout Social might be right up your alley. Sprout Social not only helps you draft, schedule, queue, and post messages in the social realm, but it also allows you to assign and manage tasks among team members and track and measure your social performance.

Sprout Social Differentiators:

Pricing: Custom

Started in 2011, Viralheat is almost too hot to handle with over 20,000 active users and a wide range of integrated social networks. Beside fan favorites Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, Viralheat throws Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Glassdoor, and more into the mix.

As of March this year, Viralheat joined forces with Cision, a global media intelligence software company. This collaboration should hopefully add value for their new and current users.

Viralheat Differentiators:

Access to custom number of connected social accounts

Ability to customize number of users

Acquisition by Cision may allow for larger R&D investments and product development to make Viralheat even better

Pricing: Free

If Twitter is your game, Tweetdeck is the name. This completely free service allows users to manage an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. You can create a custom Twitter experience by organizing lists, searches, and activities. Tweetdeck allows you to easily find what you’re searching for through topics, events, and hashtags, and you can refine all your search results through filters at the top of each timeline.

Tweetdeck Differentiators:

Pricing: Custom

Simplify and automate cross-channel social media management with New York-based company Sprinklr. This company is continuously growing and improving with recent acquisitions of seven other brands to help build out and strengthen their marketing platform. Keep your eye out for this one, Sprinklr’s CEO is intent on becoming the first social enterprise public company out of New York, which means big things for all stakeholders — old and new users included.

Sprinklr Differentiators:

Social Content includes Facebook apps, polls, quizzes, social ads and web apps

Content translation available for international reach in over 70 languages

In-depth analysis with customized and exportable reports

Goes beyond just posting content – monitor and listen to all your social channels

Pricing: $0 – $9.99 per month

New to the social realm, California-based company SocialPilot comes flying in with competitive pricing and top features. SocialPilot helps you automate your social media postings across multiple accounts, helping businesses increase their brand awareness, reach, and customer engagement. For companies selling products online, SocialPilot will actually help you automate product additions and updates on various sites. Also, SocialPilot users can automate mobile app promotions and connect to app stores for $14.99/month

SocialPilot Differentiators:

Pricing: $39 – $99 per month

Send Social Media allows users to bring together social media, email, and SMS technologies to help you grow your business, monitor your brand, and track results along the way.

Some top features in Send Social Media include the ability to post to and connect with over 30+ social networks at once, schedule updates, send bulk and group messages, and engage with your followers. You can also use Send Social Media for your email marketing campaigns by using one of their preset email templates. Then, you can personalize and schedule emails to best fit your needs. If you’re looking for some great SMS features, Send Social Media allows you to send and receive SMS texts from anywhere in the world. You can even schedule messages for a predetermined time or on a recurring basis.

Send Social Media Differentiators:

Ability to combine social media, email, and SMS capabilities in one single platform

In-depth analytics and monitoring for additional social networks such as Yelp and City Search reviews

Pricing: $1,000 – $12,000 per month

As one of the more expensive alternatives on our list, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a premium product that goes far beyond just social media content publishing.

Not only can you connect and publish content through a wide-range of social networks, you can also utilize Salesforce Marketing Cloud across email, mobile, website experiences, and connected products.

Salesforce Social Studio Differentiators:

Publish custom content on Facebook and advertise on Twitter

Send customers a discount when they’re near your store through push notifications

Build a single view of your customers and integrate that with sales and service cloud apps

Workflow rules to route tasks to different team members

Bonus Hootsuite Alternatives:

Netbase: Publish or schedule timed messages, photos, videos, or URLs on multiple social channels or assign tasks to appropriate team members. See live updates and mentions on social and keep a close eye on the intensity of chatter surrounding your brand, monitor emerging topics, and track against competitors in real-time. Netbase supports 42 languages, hosts single sign on functionality, and provides an onboarding team for implementation.

Tracx: Best for enterprise companies with large social media teams, Tracx allows you to create and publish content from a central location for simpler workflows and utilize their ‘Geo Heat Map’ to target campaigns on a location level. Benchmark each of your accounts to determine highest performance. Find buyers actively seeking the products you sell on social and send leads to the Sales team.

Spredfast: Allows for content publishing, social marketing and activity calendaring, and social listening and analytics. Spredfast easily integrates with Omniture, Google Analytics, Brandwatch, Crimson Hexagon, and more for deeper analysis and trends. They also provide a customer success team for help, scalable training, content strategy consulting, and customized ideation workshops.

Meet Edgar: This 100% self-funded organization is not your typical startup. Created in 2014, Meet Edgar helps you prevent your social media updates from going to waste by cataloging your updates into a library for later usage. Edgar categorizes status updates to help you engage with followers by customizing your schedule so you ask questions at times when you’ll be more likely to receive responses, promote your site at times when you’re more likely to get shares, and find times to share links that may result in higher click-levels.

Want More?

For further details and comparisons, check out our full database of social media marketing software. With the ability to filter by features, number of users, and more, we can help you find the system that best fits your needs.
Are we missing something? If there’s an alternative to Hootsuite that you’re currently using and loving – please share with us in the comments below. Happy posting!

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About the Author

Jennifer Gerhard

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Jennifer Gerhard is a Marketing Associate at Capterra - a free resource that helps businesses find the right software. She is a graduate of Roanoke College and in her free time enjoys running, cooking, and exploring the city with friends. Follow her on Twitter @jenn_gerhard.

Comments

Comment by Jimit on July 17, 2015 at 1:21 am

Hi Jennifer

Wonderful article and comparisons. Thanks for featuring SocialPilot in this list. Here is one small correction in price. Our pro membership plan just cost $4.99 / Month (Lowest among all competitor ) It would be glad if you correct this.

Thanks again
Jimit

Comment by Jennifer Gerhard on July 17, 2015 at 10:03 am

Thank you so much for pointing that out. I’m updating it now!

Comment by Michael on July 17, 2015 at 5:40 pm

I do love Hootsuite, but it’s about time they added Pinterest functionality. Pinterest has been around for what, 5 years? More? Long enough!

Comment by Patrice on August 17, 2015 at 11:53 am

Great article, Jennifer!
I’m a big fan of Polarfox app, it lets me post to all of my social media accounts at once. It’s faster and easier to use than other social sharing apps like HootSuite or Buffer. (http://www.polarfox.com, free trial + $4.99 one time purchase)

[…] single article on ALL the major social media outlets at the same time. Tools such as Hootsuite and other online social media management tools can post to multiple accounts all in one […]

Comment by Caroline Russell on September 9, 2015 at 10:32 am

Nice article. What about SinglePlatform by Constant Contact?

Comment by Anne Harlow on September 17, 2015 at 6:24 am

Hey I am a personal trainer and I use Colourmesocial.co.uk. Really easy to use and free!

Comment by SociaInsight on September 21, 2015 at 9:40 am

Thanks for sharing tools for social media management. but i am check one tool not in this list.. i am using http://sociainsight.com. this tool is very good management and social insights.

Comment by Jennifer Gerhard on September 23, 2015 at 12:05 pm

Thanks! We focused this list more on social engagement tools but will most likely be posting a social listening-specific post in the future. Keep an eye out!

Comment by Jennifer Gerhard on September 23, 2015 at 12:08 pm

Thanks for sharing your feedback Anne and Caroline! Love hearing other great options that our followers are using and learning what works bests for them!

Comment by Brian Penny on September 28, 2015 at 11:19 am

Hootsuite no longer allows posting to Facebook Groups, not even with the paid plans. I wasted money starting an account with them then found that out. I don’t know if any other services are affected.

Also they made it all but impossible to cancel my account and charged my card after I cancelled it. I’m still dealing with them after two weeks trying to get my money back. Ended up having to file a claim with my bank since they were unhelpful.

[…] There are loads of tools you can use, including HootSuite, Sprout Social and TweetDeck. Check out this article by Capterra, complete with a handy comparison chart for more […]

Comment by Chelsea Stitt on June 9, 2016 at 1:54 am

I just came across this post and I wanted to mention my new favorite social management tool – SMhack. (http://www.smhack.io).

The biggest differentiator SMhack has is it’s new feature that will integrate a Buzzfeed-type feed, within the interface, so you can actually curate content right there on the application. This feature will save so much time (which is why I wanted to work with the company and tell you about it).

SMhack lets you schedule posts for both Facebook and Twitter. Their price is less than others, and they don’t limit you or charge you extra based on how many analytic reports you do/need (like Hootsuite does). The price you see is what you pay…no hidden fees.

Comment by James on June 15, 2016 at 11:47 pm

I think I will stick with the hootsuite for now. Though I’ve been experiencing issues with instagram functionality…couldn’t download image….

Comment by Nibha Chaudhuri on July 4, 2016 at 8:18 am

Great post, Jennifer! I love how you’ve put forth each tool (pricing+features). I also like how you’ve included Tweetdeck, it being one of my favorite apps for social media management. Another app you might want to look into is DrumUp-social media management, content discovery and curation. It’s great for finding and scheduling fresh and relevant content from reputable sources onto multiple social media platforms. You can also track content from your favorite blogs by adding their RSS feeds. It also has a content library where you can save the posts you find interesting. It’s not too expensive ($19-$199/month). Check it out here: https://drumup.io/, and please consider adding it to your list (or future lists) if you find it interesting.

Comment by Richard Kelsey on August 22, 2016 at 10:02 am

Hi!
Does anyone know which one of these (if any) let you target your audience (language, country) before posting? Hootsuite and Buffer haven’t been able to find this.
Thanks!

Comment by Kyrian on October 12, 2016 at 4:29 am

Nice writeup, been looking for a more reliable alternative to hootsuite. I think i will go for buffer free version before i can opt into the paid version